


Fairytale of New York

by The_Hobbit_Ninja



Category: Derry Girls (TV)
Genre: Derry Girls - Freeform, Friendship, NYC, Reunited and It Feels So Good, The gang's back together, Unresolved Romantic Tension, possible Jerin
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-02
Updated: 2021-02-27
Packaged: 2021-03-13 08:47:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,087
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29150718
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Hobbit_Ninja/pseuds/The_Hobbit_Ninja
Summary: The gang is scattered to the winds, off to pursue education and careers, leaving Derry behind. Erin, attending the New York Film Academy, is drunk, miserable, and homesick. Of course, there's no possible way the gang could get back together after all the upheaval...right?Set a few years post season 2 finale!
Relationships: Possible Erin Quinn/James Maguire
Comments: 31
Kudos: 8





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hey folks! I am not entirely sure where this is going, I have a rough outline in mind, but I honestly don't know if I'll even finish this haha
> 
> If you'd like more, let me know in the comments, and I'll try to update every Sunday for my own pleasure and for yours:) 
> 
> I asked y'all in my "Taken by Surprise" Derry Girls (Jerin) fic if you'd like to see more Derry Girls content, and you said yes! So here's the beginnings of a thing:) The title of this story is taken from "Fairytale of New York" by The Pogues. Check out the song, it's delightful:)
> 
> THERE IS A FAIR BIT OF CURSING IN THIS FIC, SO BRACE YOURSELF HAHA!
> 
> "They've got cars big as bars  
> They've got rivers of gold  
> But the wind goes right through you  
> It's no place for the old  
> When you first took my hand  
> On a cold Christmas Eve  
> You promised me  
> Broadway was waiting for me
> 
> The boys of the NYPD choir  
> Were singing Galway Bay  
> And the bells were ringing out  
> For Christmas day"
> 
> ~The Pogues

“Whiskey, neat.”

The bartender nodded, his stare lingering over Erin longer than she deemed necessary. 

“Take a fucking picture then.” she was not in a pleasant frame of mind. 

“It’s just...you’ve had seven already...and it’s a Tuesday night...and you look a little...lost?”

She didn’t answer. To be honest she was extremely drunk and extremely miserable, and she just wanted the stabbing point of homesickness dulled by any means necessary. Silently she let her head drop into the crook of her arm, head swimming with alcohol, tears clawing her eyes and sobs clogging her throat. 

“Ma’am...are you alright? Do you need a cab or something?”

“No, I…” thoughts were so damn hard to string together “I need Derry.” Her words were muffled in the sleeve of her sweater, and her accent hadn’t gotten any thinner in the three months in New York, but the bartender got the gist. 

“You need dairy? I have heard milk is good for hangovers…”

She groaned pitifully.

“No not dairy, Derry.” 

“I’m sorry ma’am I don’t follow…”

She gave up and the tears soaked the scratchy fabric of her unflattering brown sweater. She wanted them back so fucking badly. She wanted Clare and Orla and Michelle and James. She wanted her family. She wanted Derry. She wanted her accent to be normal, wanted everyone to know everything about her just like she used to hate. But there was no turning back now. Her friends were scattered to the proverbial winds, James to medical school in London, Clare to a convent, Michelle to run Dennis’s old store, Orla to draw birds somewhere in northern Canada. Erin longed dreadfully for the fate they’d planned as kids, where they all stayed in Derry forever, doing little jobs that sounded perfect to little kids. But then Clare had a full blown anxiety breakdown existential crisis and insisted that the only way to mend her fizzling frayed nerves was to devote her life to the church. Erin privately had her doubts about the potential success of this measure, but Clare’s mania had been unquenchable. When Dennis finally decided that retail was the scourge of his life and put his store up for sale, Michelle bullied and blackmailed him into selling it to her for a ridiculously low price as a joke and then became uncharacteristically determined to keep the business floating. Orla literally came downstairs one day with a packed suitcase and a huge pair of binoculars around her neck and said “I’m goin’ to draw the wee birdies in Canada” and walked out of the house. James got hold of the idea that his ultimate calling was medicine, and applied to every medical school he could think of until he was accepted in London. And then there was Erin. She had always sworn that she was the “creative” type, and when the group started to talk careers constantly and Erin unceasingly enumerated her creative talents and passions, Michelle finally snapped and yelled “then go be a fucking actress Erin, you’re so dramatic already it wouldn’t be much of a leap!”  
Erin took it to heart. 

Now here she was, ugly-crying into her sweater elbow in a pub in New York City. She had been so utterly over the moon when the New York Film Academy accepted her (Michelle said they must have gotten her application mixed up with someone else’s, and Erin couldn’t help but ponder the possible truth of that opinion), that against the premonitions and admonitions of her family, she didn’t think twice. She worked, actually worked, till she had scraped up enough money to try her luck in New York. As it turned out, her acting talent was horrifyingly limited, and right then her luck seemed pretty fucked up.  
She dwelt miserably on all the discouraging predictions her family and friends had rained on her plans to go to the “New World” as Orla and Granda insisted on calling it. James was the only one who had wholeheartedly encouraged her. She wondered if it had anything to do with that peculiar look she had caught in his eyes when he looked at her (far more often than necessary) in the last year before they all went their separate ways. It was a look she would have liked to...ahem...explore...had fate--in the form of Michelle--not brashly interrupted any time that glow started to get too close to taking verbal form. She ripped her thoughts away from the “wee English fella” (the recollection of the affectionate nickname made the tears fall more profusely) now irrevocably reinstated in England. Thinking of Derry only made her want it more, oh, so much more, and it HURT. She had been an idiot, a thoughtless, rash, overeager-

“Fucking moron!”

The words fit so perfectly into her train of thought, Erin was nearly convinced they were audible only to herself. And yet...there was something familiar about that voice...something VERY familiar…

Erin nearly fell off her precariously high stool in a desperate, very drunk attempt to locate the speaker. And there she was, in all her glory. Loudly calling the bartender a fucking moron. Dark, over-strained curls yanked into a half-wilted updo. Harsh, blessed Derry accent making her perpetually course language sound like the very music of home. 

“Michelle?!?”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey folks! The second installment is here:) I’m currently updating every Sunday, so keep an eye out for the next chapter! I hope you enjoy:)   
> Some song lyrics I thought for this chapter:
> 
> “ Pack yourself a toothbrush dear  
> Pack yourself a favorite blouse  
> Take a withdrawal slip  
> Take all of your savings out  
> 'Cause if we don't leave this town  
> We might never make it out  
> I was not born to drown  
> Baby come on  
> Forget what Father Brennan said  
> We were not born in sin  
> Leave a note on your bed  
> Let your mother know you're safe  
> And by the time she wakes  
> We'll have driven through the state  
> We'll have driven through the night  
> Baby come on  
> If the sun don't shine on me today  
> And if the subways flood and bridges break  
> Will you lay yourself down and dig your grave  
> Or will you rail against your dying day  
> And when we looked outside  
> Couldn't even see the sky  
> How do you pay the rent  
> Is it your parents  
> Or is hard work dear  
> Holding the atmosphere  
> I don't wanna live like that, yeah  
> Pack yourself a toothbrush dear  
> Pack yourself a favorite blouse  
> Take a withdrawal slip  
> Take all of your savings out  
> 'Cause if we don't leave this town  
> We might never make it out”  
> ~The Lumineers

Erin had absolutely no alcohol-free brains left to decide whether this was some cruelly delightful hallucination, and no faculties to speak of with which to analyze the ridiculously small possibility that Michelle was in the same bar in the same city a third of the way around the world from Derry. Instead she half fell off her stool, and threw herself at her friend, who caught her just before she smashed her face on a chair. 

“Erin?!? What the fuck are you doing here?!”

Erin didn’t answer, she just wrapped her in a ribcage-crushing hug and began to sob. After two seconds of this treatment Michelle forcibly detangled her and held her at arm's length; two seconds after that, Michelle yanked her back in, and they held onto each other for quite sometime. Neither knew how long, and neither was the touchy-feely type, but desperate joy is catching.

“Michelle...howdidyougethere?”

“I took a French submarine. Plane, moron!”

Erin didn’t even register the insult.

“But...what about the store...and what about Derry...and what about-”

“Your Granda is runnin’ the store while we go after the prodigal daughter. Of course I’m better at selling shit than anyone could ever HOPE to be, but I gotta give it to him, your granda can upsell anyone. Anyway, I needed a break, and I figured to make it a true vacation I might as well try to bang a Yankee lad!”

“They’re not YANKEES Michelle!”

“Like fuck they’re not!”

“No Michelle, seriously, no one calls New Yorkers Yankees.”

“I do! But whatever-” Michelle unwound Erin’s arms from around her and scanned the packed pub.   
“Where the hell are those fuckers off to? Jesus, I leave them alone for five minutes and they won’t just stay put!”

“Michelle…” Erin didn’t dare to hope “who’s ‘they’?”  
She didn’t have time to answer. Erin was nearly knocked flat by a clinging, curly-haired, personal-space-ignoring, jubilant tornado who literally lept into Erin’s arms, wrapping her legs around her waist and nearly sending her crashing to the floor. Luckily, another person hit Erin from the other side, somewhat more gently, holding her up with a bear hug, hollering “Orla you’ll give her a concussion!” in an unmistakably English accent.   
“Michelle, I think I left my purse in the airport!” shrieked a high-pitched, nervous voice that sounded like the very spirit of anxiety condensed into a sound.   
“Oh stop whining Clare, no one gives a fuck about your purse, and you’re HOLDING IT for christ’s sake!” 

“Oh, so I am!” then, noticing the others for the first time “ERIN!!”

And yet another weight crashed into the pile.   
At this point every single person in the building was staring at them, but Michelle yelled as loudly as humanly possible, “there’s nothing to see here ya fuckers, just put some more alcohol in your mouth!” Everyone complied. Bizarre drunk behavior was no stranger to the Irish New York pub.  
Erin could barely breathe, but she didn’t care. She didn’t ask questions. She didn’t even wonder how it was that Derry had come to New York. She just basked in the sensations of Orla’s curls in her face and James’s warm hand rubbing circles on her back and Clare’s inaudible soprano chattering in her ear and Michelle “affectionately” yanking a piece of her hair. Erin rapturously inhaled their familiar scents, which had somehow never varied since they were sixteen. Michelle smelled like cheap perfume. James smelled like fresh-washed sheets. Clare smelled like bread and lavender. Orla smelled like pine needles. And all together, they smelled like home. They sounded like home. They looked like home. They WERE home.  
None of them could have said how long they stood there, wrapped up together, afraid to step apart and break the spell. Finally Michelle, true to form, pulled them all apart with a jovial “that’s plenty of THAT!” 

James took advantage of his opportunity, in the thick of everything, to (subtly, as he thought) keep his hand lightly on Erin’s back. 

“So Erin, you’ve got space for four of us, right?”

“Well, you see, I live in a two-room studio apartment on the thirteenth floor...yes, I have TONS of space!”

The sarcasm was either ignored or lost on Michelle.

“Grand! Do you know your way around this fucking maze yet?”

“Yeah, but I’m...so drunk I can’t remember my own phone number...let alone the way home.” Her words were comically slurred. 

“Well, you’ll just have to start remembering.”   
Michelle said matter-of-factly.  
Erin sighed, resigned to blundering through Manhattan, drunk, with four bedraggled adventurers in tow. 

“Well...do you have any...you know...stuff?”

“We’ve got a suitcase each, we piled them all in the corner over there.”

“Michelle, you do know they’ve probably all been pinched off by now?”

“Christ this city is fucked up!”

“It’s NEW YORK CITY, what did you expect, considerate saints?” 

Michelle didn’t condescend to respond, but tore off through the crowd to locate the pile of unsupervised bags. For once the “considerate saints” of Manhattan came through; the bags were alive and well. 

It took about six times as long as usual, but FINALLY, after nearly being run over by five separate taxis, dropping two suitcases while forging through a teeming crosswalk, another purse-losing false alarm, making eight wrong turns and backtracking quite a bit, they stumbled into the correct apartment building. The doorman gave Erin an extremely dubious look, but allowed them to proceed after inquiring if the four additions had kidnapped her. Michelle snapped back that it wasn’t too likely that kidnappers would take their victim back to her own apartment “ya thick motherfucker!”

They all squished into the cramped elevator, the mirrored walls throwing their distorted reflections back at them. After a creaky ride up, they spilled out on the eighteenth floor, and (after James had to unlock the door for Erin because she kept putting the key in upside down) crowded into her tiny apartment. It really was ridiculously small. The whole thing consisted of the following: a six-foot-long entry with a small hall closet, one single large room, half-split by a long curtain to the right with a (somehow incredibly comfortable) mattress on the floor, taking up a third of the curtained space, a tiny “kitchen” with a sink, small fridge, miniature dishwasher, toaster oven, two stove burners, one drawer and two miniscule cupboards, and finally a cramped bathroom with a four by four stand-up shower. That was literally the long and short of Erin’s apartment. 

The four exhausted travellers were too dragged out to care about the accommodations, as long as they existed. Clare let her suitcase fall to the floor with a pitiful sigh. 

“I wasn’t built for heavy labor!” she moaned, giving her suitcase an evil glare. 

“Ya got that right!” Michelle crowed, hoisting her own luggage onto Erin’s bed, much to the chagrin of the latter. Orla apparently had come with no luggage, confidently announcing that she would be sharing Erin’s clothes, bed, and toothbrush. James quietly asked where he should put his bag, to which Erin replied with a defeated “any damn place you want.”   
The next twenty minutes consisted of a wild flurry of activity, everyone desperately intent on sleeping as soon as could reasonably--or unreasonably--be arranged. Erin realized vaguely that she had yet to discover WHY THE HELL THEY WERE ALL THERE. Her foggy, drunk, sleepy, deliciously content brain didn’t care about the details. They were here. She was home. 

***************

The sun streaming through the window next morning illuminated Erin hanging half off her bed, Orla wrapped up in ALL the blankets (she tugged them all away from Erin as soon as she fell asleep) and spread out over the whole mattress, James mostly underneath Erin (he slept by the side of her bed and Orla had nearly kicked Erin off the bed in the night), Clare sprawled over three pillows on the floor, and Michelle on the small round rug, wrapped in bedsheets (Orla stripped them all off for no apparent reason, and everyone had been too tired to put them back on). 

They were an absolute mess, but that was to be expected. Wherever Derry went, the mess followed. 

James woke first. Groggily rebelling against the blonde hair in his face, he shoved the offending hair out of the way, accidentally yanking it, waking Erin with a jerk and a howl. Orla snapped up, hollering “TIGERS!”   
Clare, half-awake trying to escape the vibrant slice of sun cutting over her face, rolled off the fat pillows, knocking her head on the floor with a groan. Michelle said, in a sleep-drenched growl, “stop making noise.” with such a threatening edge that the others shut up immediately. After much untangling and slow awakening, Orla prowled over to the tiny fridge and began poking through it. Erin slapped her away and bemoaned the lack of sufficient available sustenance. 

“We’ve got Lucky Charms, carrots, five eggs, two apples, and peanut butter. That’s it.”

“I’ll take the peanut butter!” Orla immediately snatched it up, and started eating it out of the jar, scooping it out with her fingers, licking them, and repeating the process. 

“Orla that’s disgusting!” James’s thick skin for the Derry girls had gotten thinner while in London.   
“Give the stuff here, I’ll make SOMETHING out of it. Erin you need to sit yourself right down, you look pure sick.”   
She was dreadfully hung over. 

Soon Michelle and Clare, who had both refused to rise with the others on claims of jet lag, were drawn into the tiny “kitchen” by what Clare called “that cracker smell” and Michelle called “the stink that prick is gettin’ up, mangling perfectly good food.”   
Finally, when James had whipped up some half-hot-half-cold conglomeration of clashing ingredients that somehow tasted amazing, and all five were settled more or less comfortably either at the tiny table, perched on the short strip of counter, or on the floor, Erin took a deep breath and asked the glaringly obvious question.

“Why are you all here?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What do you think so far? Let me know in the comments! I love love love to here from you:)  
> Have a fantastic day, darling!


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *PLEASE READ NOTE FOR THE SAKE OF CONTINUITY*
> 
> Hello marvelous readers! This has been a very long week with waaaay too many things in it haha, so I did not have the opportunity to write a full chapter. I have the whole chapter planned out, I just can't seem to pry open the window of opportunity far enough to get the actual story doneXD
> 
> ANYWAY, I have a small chunk of the chapter I'm working on, which I will post here so I can technically fulfill my promise to post on Sundays. I will try to get the chapter finished before next Sunday, and when I do, I will delete this mini-chapter and assimilate it into the larger one. To use some of that delicious Irish slang, have a cracker day, darling!  
> And happy international fanworks day!

**Two weeks earlier**

James was failing. He knew it. Medical school was kicking his ass. He thought back with wry amusement on his confident, change-the-world mentality of just five months ago. His first mistake had been attempting to take eighteen credits at once in his first semester. He had failed. Literally. Not one class. Not two classes. Three. He failed three classes in the first semester, with a C and a B minus in bio and psych 1, respectively. He had started the spring semester with such high hopes, such determination to rectify his past mistakes, erase the fall semester failure with blinding, glorious A pluses. Now here he was, staring down midterms, pitifully unprepared. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t worked hard, hadn’t spent innumerable hours studying, attended every class, done all the extra credit! He had come to the miserable conclusion that he just...wasn’t good at this.

He was very, very sure that if he didn’t get at least a high A on this test, he was going to fail the entire class. What’s one failed class in the grand scheme of things? one might ask. Truly, one failed class doesn’t make or break a medical career. Four failed classes might. Three down, one to go he thought, smiling morbidly. James dug his fingertips into his temples, rubbing circles into his skull. He hadn’t slept in thirty-two hours. Papers were piled thick on the floor, tossed and scattered and crumpled and trampled like day-old academic snow. A mound of empty energy drink bottles sat reproachfully in one corner of the room. His caffeine-buzzed, sleep-deprived, study-drunk brain would NOT take in one more sentence, sort one more flashcard, make one more chart, read one more line. James looked up at the alarm clock perched on the tiny shelf above his unmade bed, seeing with horror that it was 4:23am. The midterm was in four hours and thirty-seven minutes. Without his permission, his head sank down onto the desk, pillowed on a mess of notecards that had gotten progressively sloppier and less legible as afternoon had turned to evening turned to night turned to morning. That was the last he remembered, till  
“Aye mate, ‘aven’t you got an exam at nine?” 

James bolted up so fast he saw double for a moment, recovering from a sleep he had never meant to take. 

“Uhhh...yeah I do…” then terror set in “WHAT TIME IS IT?” 

His roommate eyed him with apathetic nonchalance. “You’ll have to run, it’s 8:54.” 

James ran.  
Suffice it to say, the test went poorly. 

*******One week later*********

His hands were shaking. The room felt too warm. He had a horrible feeling that everyone in the entire class was staring at him, trying to get a peek at the percentage scribbled on his test. He didn’t want to flip the paper over, because once he looked, he would know. And right then, he didn’t want to know. He took a deep breath. He would look on three. One...two...dammit he couldn’t! As long as he didn’t know the grade, it could be a good one.  
Fuck you James, he growled internally, just flip the paper over!  
31%. His blood came to a sluggish halt in his veins. He clamped his eyes shut, praying that he’d seen it wrong. Maybe he needed glasses. Holy Mary mother of god please say my eyeballs malfunctioned.  
He opened them again. 

31%.

And next to it, the dreaded letter. F. 

James Maguire got up, walked out of the classroom, threw the thick-ass test in the trash, and bought a scone in the cafeteria, which he ate on the way back to the tiny house he shared with five other students.  
He packed his stuff, threw out all the flashcards and papers (he wished it were possible to burn them, but as appealing as it was to burn the whole college down, he had a feeling arsen might be frowned upon), laid down on the bed and fell asleep. As he was drifting off, he made up his mind, almost without realizing it. England could never truly be home. Where you’re born isn’t necessarily home. Where you live certainly doesn’t have to be home. It was time to go to Derry. 

*******

When she heard the doorbell, Michelle was deep in a beautiful bubble bath, and utterly uninterested in getting out of it any time soon. The perks of being home alone included blessed silence, and the ability to take a long bath undisturbed. The negatives included having no one to holler at to answer the door while you are in the aforesaid bath. The first strategy she tried was denial. She stayed still, praying that the annoying fucker would just leave her alone. After they rung three more times, she--with much grumbling, cursing, and other forceful expressions of her extreme displeasure--slipped and stumbled her way down the stairs, only shielded with a tightly-wrapped towel. She hollered through the door,

“I don’t want anything you’re selling and I already found Jesus so get the hell out!”

“Michelle?”

The voice on the other side of the door was muffled and questioning. And familiar...VERY familiar…

Without a thought to her scantily clad state, she flung the door open. 

“JAMES?!?!?”


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was so fun to write! I'm sorry if it comes of as scattered...I hope it reads well! So sorry this chapter was almost a week late, college coursework is a foe to be reckoned with! This chapter is also pretty short, I'm trying to do the backstory in small chunks explaining how they all got to New York...hopefully I can get another chapter up tomorrow to make up for it, cross your fingers haha! Anyway, if you're still following the story thank you thank you thank you:) Have a wonderful day, darling!

**Two weeks prior**

Orla’s table at the art festival was complete with a mini fridge stocked and packed full with frozen chocolate-chip-bacon cookies, sold for fifty cents a piece. She kept a closer eye on her little stack of quarters than on the sketches she’d spent months creating. The rest of her table was occupied by an array of thin canvases and thick watercolor paper rectangles. There were fine-lined ink drawings of black-capped chickadees, redpolls, and hummingbirds formed on quarter-inch-thick canvases no larger than her palm. There were watercolor paintings of Canada geese and waxwings and blue herons and snowy owls, all on simple, framed, 10x14 watercolor paper. There were orioles and blue jays and northern cardinals on basic quartered printer paper, drawn in pencil. There were at least twenty-five pieces in all, somehow crammed together in an aesthetically pleasing arrangement. She’d been sitting at her table for barely twenty minutes, but had already downed six of her forty-eight frozen bacon-chocolate cookies.

“What are you reading, honey?”

Orla looked up from her fascinating volume, meeting the pale blue eyes of a tiny old lady.

“A phonebook, ma’am.”

The woman laughed quietly, waiting for the artist to laugh back and tell her the truth. Orla held the book she was poring over up for the woman to see. She was, indeed, reading the phonebook.

“Oh! So ye are…”

Giving up on small talk, the woman began to pursue the artwork scattered across the table. 

“These are quite good, actually…”

“Thank you kindly!” 

“How much for these four?”

The tiny woman gestured to a set of three 4x4 watercolors depicting a northern cardinal in each season. 

“That’d be four hundred dollars each ma’am.”

“Four hundred each?! That seems a bit steep to be fair…”

Orla pondered for a moment, then leaned in conspiratorially. 

“I’d part with them for ten dollars a piece, if that would suit!” she whispered. 

The woman laughed heartily at that, then offered “How about three hundred for the set?”

“That’d be lovely! I’ll throw in a frozen bacon chocolate cookie for good behavior!” 

“For good behavior?”

“People get out of jail for good behavior, I don’t see why you couldn’t have a frozen bacon cookie for good behavior...”

The woman chuckled with a look at Orla that bordered on concern for her health. 

“I think I’ll have to leave the bacon cookies to you, sweet girl. But I will take the birds, thank you very much.”

By the time six o’clock rolled around, Orla had sold every single painting, as well as three bacon cookies, and had stashed three thousand dollars in her minifridge and sixteen quarters in her stack (she had bought quite a few cookies from herself). 

Orla considered all the wee birdies in Canada thoroughly drawn, and three thousand dollars more than enough to retire on. So she left. 

**Two weeks later**

“So medical school was a bit too much for you, eh?”

Michelle and James were settled at the kitchen table after she had sprinted up the stairs to throw on some real clothes. James had spilled his whole sob story, knowing full well that Michelle would never let him live down his spectacular failure, but at the same time taking comfort in her (somewhat brash) familiarity. 

“I suppose it was. I gave it everything I had and it just wasn’t enough.”

“Can’t say I’m surprised, it’s not like you ever had much to begin with!”

“Honestly Michelle, your bedside manner is appalling. Couldn’t you at least-”

His words were cut off by the screech of the ancient doorbell. 

“Jesus Christ, as if you weren’t enough for one day James!” Michelle grumbled as she dragged herself with exaggerated exhaustion over to the door. When she pulled it open, she was met with the ecstatic exclamation “Michelle Mallon, how you’ve grown!!” 

James had followed Michelle into the front hall. Their stunned voices rose in combined astonishment. 

“ORLA?!?”

**Author's Note:**

> What do you think?? Want more? Let me know!  
> Comments, good bad or indifferent, are more than welcome:) I love to hear from you!


End file.
